3 destructive habits that keep photographers from booking more clients (and how to vaporize them)
Image by: @thebarlemy
Do you ever wonder why some photographers seem to be offering the same thing as you, and you feel you are as good as they are (or even better) but they seem to be booking and you aren’t?
The devil is often in the details. While you may believe you are on the same level as others who are finding success, there is something more at play if you aren’t succeeding. That’s when we have to look deeper. It may be painful to dig up the dirt in your garden to look at the quality of the soil, it’s the step we need to take to remedy the soil quality so that the seeds of booking clients will grow in rich ground.
The Habit Trap
What are habits? They are things we do that we no longer think about too actively. We do them on auto-pilot. We have thousands of little scripts that run throughout our day. Some get us to where we want to go (going to the gym each morning to improve our health) and some hold us back from where we want to go (biting our nails when we wish to grow them).
Some habits we are aware of, but over the course of our life, a lot of invisible habits have also crept into our psyche. But because they are so automatic, we may not even realize they are there until someone points them out.
Many photographers have not taken any business and marketing training, or at least not a lot of it. This is a perfect landscape for the harbouring of habits that sabotage our efforts to build a business and book ideal clients, reinforced by a lack of knowledge. What can’t be identified can’t be refuted.
Here are 3 destructive (and possibly silent and invisible habits that might keep you from booking more clients), along with a strategy to drop them or convert them into better habits that support business building and client booking!
Negative thinking
If we believe expressions like “violence begets violence” then how might that extend to what we think? Negative thinking begets negative thinking. A piece of bad news can spiral us into a windstorm of how everything else is crap too. Nowhere to go but down. But we are used to this thinking because it seems to be the predominant thinking of today’s society. Don’t believe me? Tune into the news and tell me the ratio of negative to positive stories.
If we don’t believe we can book clients, this belief will sit like a brick on every task and activity you do. Like the proverbial luggage that we carry, we are weighed down constantly and that slows us down. And then if it prevents us from booking clients, then it reinforces our negative thoughts about why, and we stack even more bricks.
So when we say “it’s the economy” or “it’s the $20 photographer down the street” - this is misdirection. It’s not really the economy or the person down the street, it’s you THINKING it’s the economy or the person down the street.
Imagine for a moment a utopian world where all negative thinking was erased from your brain for an hour each day. Do you think you would be productive in that hour? You wouldn’t have a single negative thought, which would free you to do tasks that otherwise you might not. It might sound utopian, but I’m here to tell you that you can do this. And not for an hour but permanently. It’s about training your mind to reframe.
Overcome it: Keep a gratitude journal. Replace negative thoughts with their positive counterpart when one pops into your head. Listen to success mindset videos or audios. Listen to biographies of successful people. If one person can do it on this earth, it means we are all equipped. We just have to take action.
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Breaking the negativity habit liberates you to feel positive in your approach to find clients. Positive energy is viral, like a laugh. See what happens with bookings when you put down your bricks!
2. Believing rejection is a bad thing
Seems that no matter how many times people say failure isn’t failure but are good life lessons, our world might implode when we get that one email (if we aren’t ghosted, that is) - sorry we went with someone else. The reason why we consider the rejection bad is because we desperately want bookings. So that sting is extra big.
Let’s play a scenario. You receive a wedding inquiry. It’s a sought after summer weekend, but they only want 4 hours, there’s a lot of driving, and the venue isn’t your favourite because it has crappy lighting. But you want clients and you write back with your best sales pitch. They come back and say no. REJECTION! FAILURE! Those bells are ringing in your head. But almost instantly, another wedding inquiry lands into your inbox. They love your work, it’s a venue of your dreams, 10 hours plus engagement and they are already talking about the wedding album. What would you now think of the first inquiry? No longer a rejection or a failure, you would consider it a BLESSING that it didn’t work out because something so much better came!
Now, if those 2 things didn’t happen instantly beside one another, you might have ruminated in the rejection and then allowed your negative thinking habit from point 1 to take over and spiral you into impostor territory. Thing is, our intuition and the intuition of the universe has our best interest at heart. If something didn’t manifest, it probably wasn’t right. We just weren’t willing to admit it. As the example above, you already knew that the 4 hour wedding wouldn’t get you the income you want, the venue would be a challenge and you might not have beautiful and shareable images to attract other clients, and that drive would be terrible. But the desire to book clouded your judgement. That’s where the universe stepped in and sent the rejection; to keep you open for the better outcome to come.
Overcome it: Practice training your mind that rejection and failure are the natural part of our business process that help us navigate to our optimal path. Look at every rejection carefully and identify honestly what you may have missed. Reframe as a blessing and as an opening for something better to step in. Then, start getting excited about what better thing is headed your way!
3. Seeking photographic approval
We are obsessed with trying to feel good enough. That drives our experience with clients. But this habit of serving to get validation can be very harmful because instead of holding the client in our heads while we work, we are thinking of how we are doing so that we can feel good about it.
Overcome it: Positive self-talk that you do good work. Create a note in your client file and thank them for their business, as a means of reinforcing your good work in absence of their feedback. You can even write your own testimonial!
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